Sunday, February 04, 2018

Rage, Fear, Hope and the Emotions of Revolution

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In its own telling the
Egyptian revolution began with days of anger that broke the barrier of fear. Egyptians raised their heads and proudly
looked to a new day. It ended with ecstatic manifestations of popular
acclamation as the military took power from an elected civilian president and
embarked on a campaign of violence against his supporters.In the intervening years scholars,
officials and activists have sought to explain the successes and failures of
the uprising largely with reference to the interests, analyses, and practices
that shaped the activity of the many actors in these events.The language of emotion has largely
dropped out of the analytic frame despite subsequent allusions to revolutionary
betrayal, disillusion, and despair.

One exception is an
article by Wendy Pearlman, “Emotions and Microfoundations of the Arab
Uprisings” published in 2013.Pearlman argues for the importance of emotions as crucial to any
analysis of the uprisings, including the Egyptian revolution.Her viewpoint differs significantly
from the one I employ here because she appears to think of emotions as more
akin to what many researchers in the field would call moods or background
feelings.She describes emotions
as orientations toward the external environment that shape cognitive
evaluations of the world.Thus she
presents emotions as influencing cognitive evaluations or as themselves
influenced by them.She proposes
consequently that changing the emotional orientation of people toward external
events, including political ones, will change their evaluations of those
events.

The seventh anniversary of the
Egyptian revolution of 2011 is an appropriate time to revisit those initial
claims about the importance of emotion. Did emotion play a significant role in the revolutionary
period and, if so, how?Were
Egyptians insufficiently rational and emotionally too volatile to make a
democratic transition feasible?Even
a first attempt to respond to these questions requires a more careful look at
how we understand emotions and their historical and social contexts.Initially it is crucial to understand
that there are now and have been, for centuries, two distinct ways of
understanding human emotion.One
way of looking at emotion is as the antithesis of rational cognition; the other
way, now backed up by significant research and philosophical inquiry, is that
emotions are a form of cognition and without them we cannot be rational.

In what follows I pursue the view
that emotions are neither the antithesis of cognition nor a background
condition that affects and is affected by our evaluations, including our moral
evaluations, of the world external to us.Emotions, in this framework, are
those evaluations.They are
cognitive processes without which human beings cannot engage in purposive
rational activity.As might be
expected with any evaluative process of something as complicated as the
situation of human beings in the social and physical world, emotions reflect
our beliefs about the nature of that world, about the possibilities and dangers
it holds, and about how others respond and expect us to respond.

The Egyptian government, then led by
President Hosni Mubarak, established January 25 as Police Day as a national
holiday in 2009. Police Day commemorated an event that decades earlier had
provoked Egyptian anger. On that day in 1952 British soldiers assaulted an
Egyptian police station in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia and 41 Egyptians
died.Fury at that assault is
often said have ignited the attacks on European-owned stores and European
individuals in Cairo the following day when shops were destroyed and scores
of people were killed and injured in an event whose specific origins remain a
mystery.Police Day was thus a
somewhat ambiguous holiday.It
celebrated resistance but it also celebrated a police force and ministry of the
interior that, with its violence and corruption, no longer merited the respect
of millions of Egyptians.

Tens of thousands of Egyptians
demonstrated January 25, 2011 until dispersed by the police using tear gas,
clubs and concussion grenades in Cairo and other cities.Public support for the government
plummeted over the following days especially as demonstrations were violently
repressed in Suez.One widely
viewed video featured a lone demonstrator who opened his jacket and approached
a policeman, daring him to shoot.Filmed on a cellphone from a balcony overlooking the street you can see
the demonstrator drop to the ground, the pop of the gun, and the sudden cries
of the observers in the apartment.

Organizers announced that January
28 would be the Friday of Rage. Hundreds
of thousands of people demonstrated in Cairo and other cities after a tense
couple of days. In addition to the
mass demonstrations, scores of police stations were attacked and thousands of
prisoners were released as local jails and prisons were destroyed or left
unguarded.Police disappeared from
the streets and a prolonged period of public insecurity followed. Even the
first deployment of tanks by the Egyptian armed forces into Tahrir Square in
Cairo was met by violence until it became clear that the army was not about to
launch an armed assault on protesters.

As William Reddy
argues, naming emotions makes them less ambiguous and us more committed to
them.If true for individuals in
the moment it is equally true of historical reconstruction. January 28 was the
“Friday of Rage.” Must it necessarily have been a day when all protestors
expressed their rage?Is “rage” a
good description of what hundreds of thousands of Egyptians felt that day?And is it the only valid
description?As the noon prayer
came to an end on January 28 I stood among hundreds of Egyptians who had
gathered at the Mostafa Mahmood Mosque.Surrounded by young riot policemen with shields, helmets and batons, my initial
response was fear.As the police
opened a path for the crowd to head down Arab League Street and as it became
clear that demonstrators vastly outnumbered police I felt relief and
exhilaration.Perhaps as a
foreigner I lacked an adequate appreciation of Egyptian emotional responses but
given what people around me were saying as well as videos still available on
YouTube I think my own experience was common.So clearly there was not just rage, even if we had all
assembled in response to a day of rage.Rage may also be too blunt a word although it is a good and correct
translation of the Arabic word, ghadab, that named the day.Perhaps outrage is a better approximation of the relevant emotion or
perhaps indignation.These words,
however, give a very different sense to the dominant emotion.They clearly add a moral dimension to
the emotional description.

If anger was the right
word, the source of the anger is more difficult to discern.One common explanation is that deprivation,
hunger, and poverty cause anger.From Egypt to Iran and Tunisia and the United States inequalities of
wealth and income provoke anger that then translates into disruptive political
interventions by the afflicted. Anger is said to drive the poor to attack the rich and appropriate
their property.

But, again, is anger the right
name? Why is anger rather than envy or greed the dominant emotion fueling such
an attack? Angry people might demonstrate but in Egypt there are good reasons
to think it was urban middle and lower middle-income people who demonstrated
and talked up their anger at the regime.Property theft, by the rich and poor alike, was widespread during the
revolution but it does appear to have been driven primarily by greed or avarice.Sometimes it involved violence but more
frequently state property and unguarded private property were simply stolen.

Anger was widely perceived as the
dominant emotion of the early days of the uprising. We might be forgiven for
forgetting that for decades Egyptians and external observers have debated the
role of anger in the country’s social and political life.There are many convenient
explanations besides deprivation for the anger of Egyptians. Rage figures
prominently in some accounts of contemporary Arab and Islamic politics.Take, for example the 1990 article “The
Roots of Muslim Rage” by Bernard Lewis.Lewis proposed that a significant (but undefined) number of Muslims,
whom he termed fundamentalists, were at war with secularism and modernism.In this he was largely echoing
modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s that argued the transition from
tradition to modernity provoked profound psychological unease or disease among
affected populations.Lewis proposed
that the introduction of Western economic, political and social institutions
had led to worsened outcomes for most of the population in Muslim majority
countries and that what he called a “mood” of anger and resentment spread among
people who were increasingly aware that, as heirs to “an old, proud, and long
dominant civilization” they were being cast aside by their inferiors.He argued that the “instinct of the
masses” in locating the sources of their increasing poverty and lack of freedom
in the West was not wrong.He
further argued that there are “moments of upheaval and disruption, when deeper
passions are stirred, [and]…dignity and courtesy towards others can give way to
an explosive mixture of rage and hatred….”

Lewis’s critics were not slow to react.In this they followed a path set out by
Edward Said. Muslims, Arabs, and especially Palestinians were indeed angry they
agreed but not because of lost civilization glory, modernization, or
secularism.Their anger rose from
precisely what Lewis scanted: dispossession and despoliation, particularly, of
Palestinians. They thought Lewis
was wrong to suggest that anger was unjustified or that it was rooted in a centuries-long
cultural tradition but he was not, evidently, wrong to think that pervasive anger
ran deep and wide and that it was a societal rather than an individual
response. If Palestinians are
frequently angry (and likely far angrier than Israelis) it may have less to do
with their mood or their culture than with the constant repetition of word and
actions that are demeaning and destructive and the absence of any safe spaces
in which to recover.So at least
one Palestinian psychologist proposed to me over lunch one day many years ago
during a seminar I had helped to organize about trying to ameliorate the trauma
of seeing a loved one die violently.

Anger, in the way that Lewis and
many of his critics use the word, is usually described in hydrological,
geological or meteorological terms. This is often called a “hydraulic” theory. Anger is a fluid and, although it can be
dammed, channeled, or contained, these attempts can fail. Then the pressure
becomes too great and like a volcano or a geyser it overflows, erupts and
destroys everything in its path.Such metaphors are common but research in psychology, cognition, and
philosophy all indicate they are both wrong and useless.An emotion, including anger, is a
cognitive process not a hydraulic one.It is a way we have of evaluating events in the external world.

To the degree that accounts of the
Egyptian revolution place emphasis on cognition, they focus on interests and
behavior.Frequently they focus on
the interests and behavior of the working class.This is so for all versions of political economy whether
so-called rational choice microeconomic modeling or the soft political economy
critics of neo-liberalism.In a
field still torn by the debate over Orientalism it is understandable why
emotions vanished from an academic literature concerned that Egyptian workers
appear more or less as rational as European or American workers. Thus, in line
with contemporary theories of social movements the interests of Egyptian workers
are held to be destabilizing and oppositional but not necessarily emotionally
profound.Indeed most scholars consider
the discontent of the lower classes and their desire to redistribute the wealth
of society a permanent feature of social life that, in non-democratic
societies, only the coercive might of the state prevents.The intrusion of emotions into social
life in this literature is often seen as an idiosyncratic aspect of Egyptian
society or culture.

The insistence on interests and the
exclusion of emotions from understanding revolution is more surprising
considering that revolutionary leaders have often not shared it.Ayatollah Khomeini famously asserted
that revolutions were not about the price of watermelons although he provided
no definitive answer as to what they were about. Lenin described revolutions as
festivals of the oppressed, a description echoed in a discussion by Sahar
Keraitim and Samia Mehrez of Tahrir Square as a mulid.One bit of evidence in my own
experience supporting their view is that when I entered Tahrir Square very
early in the morning of January 29 one of the first people I encountered was a
man with a large tray of cookies that he was giving out in celebration as if at
a popular religious festival.My
understanding of the argument Keraitim and Mehrez make is not that the
demonstrations in Tahrir were religious but that the repertoire of practices
deployed in revolution must make some emotional sense to the participants.Thus, to see the demonstrations in
Tahrir as if they were events in which marchers proceeded to a central
location, listened to speeches, and then dispersed is misleading. So, too, estimating the number of
demonstrators based on the idea that Egyptian urban
squares could only hold a limited number of people is misleading because, as in
a festival but unlike a rally, people were constantly coming and going.

So far I have drawn on contemporary
research on emotions from many directions—psychological, philosophical, and
even medical—all of which suggests the hydraulic approach to understanding
emotions is both wrong and useless.This includes the work of Antonio Damasio on the neuroscience of the
brain, summed up usefully in his book Descartes’
Error, the lengthy work of political philosophy by Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, and The Navigation of Feeling, historical
sociologist William Reddy’s study of the period before and after the French
Revolution. The common thread of these works and many more is not simply to
reject the Cartesian dualism of mind and body (including the brain) and the
Humean dualism of passionate attachment to goals and cold reasoning about how
to reach them.Rather they propose
that emotions are cognitive processes that direct our attention to events in
the world through which we evaluate their implication for our own goals and
well-being.Emotions are cognitive
processes even if we are not always conscious of how they work.As evaluations emotions combine our
beliefs about the world, including the social world, with our understanding of
the importance of our goals for ourselves.

Anger is not a deep well-spring of
energy ever-ready to be tapped nor is fear an immobile barrier to be broken
once and for all. Fear can immobilize us when
we understand the danger of an occurrence and re-evaluate downwards the
importance of an activity or goal in which we are engaged.Fear, like anger, is a cognitive
response to events external to our own lives.Before January 25 Egyptians did not confront a barrier that
was later shattered.Before January
25 most Egyptians understood that the police state in which they lived was
intact even if it was not as concerned to prevent the presence of all
oppositional speech or actions as had been the case under Nasser, Sadat and
even the early Mubarak period.After
January 29 Egyptians observed that the capacity of the police forces had been
severely weakened.Consequently
there were few limits imposed by the government on overt speech or public
mobilization.Political leaders,
from the Muslim Brothers to the Revolutionary Socialists, thus became bolder
and appeared to be less fearful and more courageous.What had not changed was that, no matter how courageous the
opposition became, most high government officials including within the armed
forces had not accepted in principle or in practice that freedom of expression
or association as foundational.

To the degree that anger combines
an ethical evaluation (are we legitimately obstructed?) about our own goals
with a sense of their importance the expression of anger will differ across
society and within society as well as over time.So too will any action we undertake.As Neil Ketchley has proposed in a
recent book, many Egyptians viewed the police and the jails attached to police
stations as the most salient obstructions to their lives.These Egyptians, almost entirely from
working class neighborhoods, experienced profound anger about particular police
and particular stations.Something
like one quarter of all primary police stations in Egypt were destroyed during
the last few nights of January 2011 by local residents.Ketchley’s account suggests that
the destruction of the police stations in such large numbers and short a period
of time occurred because the police had already concentrated their efforts on
the massive demonstrations in Cairo and other cities.

The demonstrations had been called
to express anger but it does not require deep analysis to think that the anger
of the demonstrators was different than the anger of those who attacked police
stations. Nor is it a stretch to
think that as news of the assaults on police stations and some of the large
prisons where prisoners were freed over the following days Egyptians came to
realize that the threats of police violence that had inhibited speech and
public presence were greatly diminished. Thus rather than seeing these
differences as based on preferences or styles or interests, contemporary
understandings of emotion suggest that different Egyptians evaluated the role
of the police in their lives and the ways in which they significantly affected
their lives in different ways.There was and is no single kind of anger that Egyptians expressed or
ought to have expressed if we think of anger as evaluative and cognitive.What shook the Egyptian government was
the confluence of these two streams of anger, themselves made up of many
decisions by particular people on their own or in small groups.

If anger often involves a belief in
the illegitimacy of an obstacle then what particular obstacles did Egyptians
focus their attention on and how did they come to see them as
illegitimate?How did they come to
believe that attacking that obstacle to their well-being was more important than
the response it threatened?Answering this question will require us to look more carefully at how
different groups among the Egyptian population understood government policies
to be unfair.For some Egyptians
police corruption and brutality were immediate concerns; for others these were
significant concerns but appeared to be systemic problems rather than immediate
threats; for others no doubt the decision by the government to shut off any
electoral path to change the previous fall was more telling.

Whatever emotions Egyptians
expressed in 2011 they likely still experience today.Anger, fear, and courage (not to mention many other
emotions) are still part of Egyptian life, but they are now evaluations that
must be made within the context of the difficulties of the revolutionary period
itself, the reconstruction of the police forces, and the implacable
unwillingness of the armed forces to accept peaceful disagreement and political
opposition.It is thus not
surprising that for many Egyptians new emotional responses to the world have
become dominant.It is to explore
more of these issues that I hope to devote forthcoming entries.

I plan to write several more
entries on understanding the revolution through the emotions but before ending
two points are worth making.First
is that if emotions are indeed cognitive evaluations of the events in the world
external to ourselves then revolutionary periods must be emotionally fraught
and we should expect to see a maelstrom of rapidly changing emotions.As the ordinary institutions and
expectations break down in a revolutionary upheaval we should expect that
people—individually and in contact with each other—should rapidly revise their
evaluations of the meaning of those events for their own well-being. Rapid emotional change may have been
indicative less of the volatility of Egyptians than of the volatility of the
social and political environment. In such a situation ,it hardly seems plausible that people
would retain the same cognitive evaluations of (or consequent commitments for)
abstract goals such as democracy or “rule of law” whose very definitions are
subject to significant debate during a period of intense, rapid, and nearly
constant change.This does not
imply Egyptians did not desire democracy, rule of law, or an Islamic state, or
socialism; it simply implies that by 2013 they may have had very different
ideas about what those goals might be or what the impact of trying to attain
them would be.

Second, while human emotions are
plastic to some degree there is reason to believe that a prolonged period
during which it proves to be impossible to solve problems posed in the external
world itself has emotional consequences.The unethical psychological practices designed by American psychologists
to induce “learned hopelessness” among Iraqis were based on real psychological
research. The primary method
involved is to ensure that experimental subjects are conditioned to believe
that nothing they can do affects their condition.

In one of the earliest entries to
this blog I noted that the Egyptian Armed Forces wanted one thing above all
else: to ensure that Egyptians never came to believe that their words or
actions affected state policies.Even when state policies do change it is crucial that they not be seen
to change in direct response to popular participation or public criticism.Hannah Arendt once wrote of the
importance of arbitrary rule as more than a result of dictatorship; it was, she
proposed, a method of rule because it sapped any sense of agency.Egyptians are not experimental subjects
and the analogy is necessarily inexact but it looks as if the years since 2013
have been a prolonged and significantly successful attempt to deprive Egyptians
of belief in their own agency or, in other word, of hope.If the past is any guide it will not
last forever but while it does it will be a profoundly unpleasant world in
which to live.